[EN] Red Hat anuncia RHEL OpenStack Platform

Red Hat's vision of building an enterprise-ready version of the increasingly popular OpenStack cloud continues to coalesce: The company today announced the RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) OpenStack Platform, built to serve as a foundation for customers' own OpenStack clouds, along with an IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offering dubbed Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure.

"As organizations migrate from traditional virtualization deployments to cloud architectures, the focus is shifting from just the hypervisor to the entire stack of cloud software, which includes IaaS cloud system software and hybrid cloud management," said Gary Chen, research manager for enterprise virtualization software at IDC. "As customers start evaluating technologies like OpenStack for cloud, Red Hat's new solutions are well-positioned to generate interest from the industry."

As the name implies, RHEL OpenStack Platform unites RHEL Server with the company's flavor of OpenStack, providing a foundation for building public, private, and hybrid clouds. RHEL Server serves as the core for running OpenStack workload servers (compute nodes, storage nodes, and controller nodes) as well as guest VMs; Red Hat OpenStack integrates with RHEL for the development of managed public and private clouds.

Naturally, Red Hat is pushing the openness of its cloud package as well as the service it brings to supporting the platform. The company envisions customers developing, deploying, and tailoring their OpenStack infrastructure to their liking, regardless of which brand of hypervisor they're using. Red Hat promises to maintain the underlying RHEL Server and OpenStack code; the company also brings testing and certification for each OpenStack release, and its array partners will provide compute, storage, networking, ISV software, deployment, and customization services.

Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure is designed for organizations to build and manage private cloud IaaS for traditional workloads as well as cloud-infrastructure-based workloads on Red Hat OpenStack. It has four main components, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, which handles both Linux and Windows enterprise-grade workloads.

Red Hat's OpenStack IaaS offering is part of the Cloud Infrastructure mix, providing the private-cloud component built on OpenStack. RHEL Server, meanwhile, serves as the OS for guest VMs running on OpenStack compute nodes.

Both Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure will be available in July.

Where Is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7?

June 13, 2013

BOSTON. In a standing room-only set of sessions at the Red Hat Summit here this week, the future of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was revealed.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the Linux vendor's core platform, had its last major release with the debut of RHEL 6 in November of 2010. Red Hat has been releasing major new RHEL platforms every two to three years, and at its 2012 Summit event the company had hinted that 2013 could be the year in which RHEL 7 might be released.

As it turns out, the exact timing for the general availability of RHEL 7 is still in question. Ronald Pacheco, Senior Manager, Technology Product Management at Red Hat, said that his company has been working on RHEL 7 for a long time.

He stressed that RHEL 6 and 5 are still strong platforms and are being updated and iterated. RHEL 6.4 for example was recently released, providing new Microsoft interoperability capabilities.

That said, Paccheco realizes that there are a lot of questions around RHEL 7 and its availability.

"The plans are to put out a beta at the end of the calendar year," Paccheco said.

XFS

In terms of features, RHEL 7 will mark a departure on a number of fronts from previous Red Hat releases.

Ric Wheeler, Kernel File and Storage Team Senior Manager and Architect at Red Hat, told the capacity crowd that the XFS filesystem will be the new default in RHEL 7 instead of EXT4.

Previously there had been some discussion that perhaps the Btrfs filesystem could play a big role in the upcoming Linux release, though Wheeler said the plan is now to make sure that Btrfs is in shape so it can be included as an option.

From a Linux kernel perspective, Wheeler hinted that from a timing perspective the Linux 3.11 kernel is likely the one that would power RHEL 7. The most recent generally available kernel right now in the upstream Linux community is Linux 3.9, with 3.10 set to debut in the coming weeks.

Secure Boot

From a hardware enablement perspective, Peter Martuccelli, Senior Engineering Manager for Platform Enablement at Red Hat, said that RHEL 7 will support UEFI and Secure Boot.

RHEL 7 will also include the Hardware Error Reporting Mechanism [HERM], which aims to improves server logging mechanisms by integration with various hardware error input methods.

Networking

One of the biggest areas of improvement in RHEL 7 is likely to be networking services.

Rashid Kahn, Senior Engineering Manager for networking services at Red Hat, joked with the audience that from his perspective RHEL 7 is in fact, "all about networking."

One of the major new improvements is the addition of the Team Driver. Kahn explained that the driver combines multiple networking interfaces into a single interface. The goal of the driver is to provide improved throughput, networking redundancy and easier management.

The Precision Time Protocol (PTP) will also land in RHEL 7. PTP was available as a technology preview in RHEL 6.4 and is expected to be fully supported in RHEL 6.5.

"If time is money, you might want to try PTP precision time protocol," Kahn said.

PTP can have a use-case in high-frequency trading as it ensures precise sub microsecond synchronization of distributed clocks over the network.

The other big addition set to land in RHEL 7 is the inclusion of Open vSwitch support. Open vSwitch is an open source virtual switch that initially became available in the upstream Linux kernel with the Linux 3.3 release in March of 2012.

Kahn said that Open vSwitch will be a tech preview in RHEL 6.5 and will be fully supported in RHEL 7.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

Red Hat Looks Beyond Linux For Its Next Decade Of Growth

Red Hat's last 10 years were all about enterprise Linux. The next 10 will be about enterprise clouds.

Ten years ago, Red Hat went "all in" on the enterprise. While the open-source software vendor had been selling distributions and support for Linux since 1993, it wasn't until 2003 that Red Hat completely dedicated its brand to the enterprise. While the move made Red Hat some enemies, it has also proved profitable, allowing the company to commit fully to open source without also committing itself to poverty.

In his opening Red Hat Summit keynote, Red Hat Executive VP Paul Cormier suggested that "Today’s problems can’t be solved by one company," requiring open-source communities to tackle thorny infrastructure problems. In a ReadWrite interview this week at the event, however, Cormier made it clear that Red Hat definitely doesn't see itself as a passive bystander to this open development.

ReadWrite: Red Hat's first 10+ years were largely spent making Linux a default enterprise standard; something safe for enterprise consumption. What will Red Hat spend the next 10 years doing?

Cormier: You'll remember that roughly 10 years ago we stopped shipping consumer-oriented Red Hat Linux, introducing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL, previously Red Hat Advanced Server). The reason? We found that our split personality on Linux - shipping Linux distributions for both enterprise and personal use - didn't "make Linux safe for the enterprise," to use your terminology. The first five years of our history saw Bob Young selling Red Hat CDs out of the trunk of his car at flea markets. Those first few years weren't really about making Linux part of the enterprise.

Our next 10 years will be spent building out other essential infrastructure for the enterprise, while continuing to improve RHEL. A significant part of this involves our hybrid cloud initiative. We've been talking about cloud for a long time, and while Amazon would have us believe that enterprises are moving their workloads to the public cloud tomorrow, it's simply not going to happen. This shift will take a 10 years or longer. I've been in technology for decades: the enterprise moves slowly.

ReadWrite: So what is Red Hat building for this enterprise of the future?

Cormier: The infrastructure we're building has several components. OpenStack is one cog in the wheel, as is Linux. I see OpenShift, another piece, as how you "cloudify" middleware, something we get asked to do all the time as enterprises want us to move more JBoss services to the cloud.

But this won't happen overnight. After all, when we acquired JBoss, enterprises tended to use it in development, not production. Now they use it in serious production deployments. We've invested hundreds of millions of dollars to get it to this stage.

We will continue to invest to ensure that enterprises have the choice of running on a completely open platform, with the option to run the same app across bare metal, public cloud, hybrid cloud, etc. So you need to be able to support workloads across these different targets. That's what we're building.

ReadWrite: Okay, but how does this differ from others' cloud strategies?

Cormier: The problem with the other PaaS providers is that if you build on any of the other PaaS solutions, whether it comes from Google or someone else, you're not getting the application out of their network. Ever. The app is only going to run on their network. Customers don't want this. They want to own the future of their application. Red Hat gives customers this ability by providing a consistent platform across different deployment targets.

ReadWrite: As strong as Red Hat is within enterprise computing, you haven't really made a dent in the developer community. Given the importance of developers to enterprise IT adoption today, how will Red Hat evolve to embrace developers?

Cormier: Over the last 10 or 11 years we've had three pivotal moments as regards developers. The move to RHEL was the first. Next came JBoss, which was initiated by developer demand. Our customers started asking us, "How do I not go to .Net?" We acquired JBoss, building out our entire stack, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.

We did this for one reason: we wanted a strong community for developers: built for, and by, developers. We didn't acquire it and lock it up. Here at Red Hat, development always goes back to the community. It’s in our DNA.

The third pivotal moment is OpenShift, starting with OpenShift Online. We did this purely for the developer. Atypically for Red Hat, we didn't even have a business model for it when we introduced it. We just knew we needed it for our developer community. Later, customers started asking us for an enterprise version.

I don't think people appreciate just how much of a fundamental change OpenShift is for Red Hat: it has introduced a new business model for us. This is a big deal for us. It has required that we introduce a new accounting model and a range of other things.

Importantly, OpenShift is helping us reach a new developer audience. If you look at the OpenShift Application Gallery, you'll see developers that we simply weren't reaching through RHEL or JBoss.

Going forward, we want to give the developer a consistent platform whether they want it in the cloud, on a traditional middleware platform, etc.

ReadWrite: How does OpenStack factor into all this?

Cormier: OpenStack is Linux all over again. Look at how Linux started. In the early days there were 15-plus distributions and applications didn't work across them. Even end-users like large banks were building their own Linux distributions. RHEL normalized all this and made Linux consummable by the masses. KVM came along and we melded it into the operating system.

OpenStack is doing the same thing. There are a lot of common needs/elements between OpenStack and the operating system. We're making the cloud consistent by merging the different pieces into one platform. We're going to bring OpenStack into the enterprise just as we did with Linux, by committing to be truly open.

There are two ways to displace proprietary incumbents, either through commoditization or innovation. We're doing both.

The Secret(s) to OpenStack's Overnight Success

This is pretty amazing. Just a year ago Rackspace was in control. Now it's just one of the community. A key member of the OpenStack community, to be sure, but it's a testament to the vitality of the OpenStack community that Rackspace is no longer the top code committer.